Apprenda seeks to make private PaaS more practical

Many corporate developers have tried a platform as a service — Heroku, Engine Yard, Cloud Foundry — to develop and test applications. But when it comes time to deploy those applications, it’s hard to get their companies to approve running those applications on PaaSes that themselves run atop Amazon Web Services or other public cloud infrastructure.

One reason for that reluctance is that IT pros are acutely aware that outages at Amazon have impacted Heroku and other PaaS providers . But nonetheless, developers have whet their appetite working on these public platforms and now want to keep working with them but in a way that is palatable to their bosses, says Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, the maker of a .Net-specific PaaS.

To help developers make that jump, the Clifton Park, NY-based vendor now offers a new free public PaaS instance called ApprendaCloud.com they can experiment with and then bring in-house to run on IT-approved infrastructure.

Apprenda had offered a downloadable version of is PaaS but feedback was that developers wanted an online instance they can use in the public cloud then just pull in-house, overcoming IT objection, Schuller said.

Some companies are interested in bringing PaaSes in-house because they would like to field a single platform to build and run both internal and customer-facing applications.